War Stories

My Great-Grandfather, William was in the Air Force from 1941-1945, and went to war for three of those four years. In World War II, my great-grandfather flew in the air bombers, as an armer. He was in City of Kamloops squadrant 419, nicknamed “the moose squadrant”, after Moose Fulton, a lawyer of Kamloops, whose brother was in the squadrant. My great-grandfather’s dream when entering the Air Force was to fly the planes. He was capable but was not allowed to do this, the lieutenant had other plans for him. So, instead, he installed bombs in planes, and took care of gun turrets. One day, he was on a Lancaster, a four-engined heavy bomber, and something had gone wrong. Usually if there was a short distance to go for the bomber it could maybe make it on two engines, if they were lucky, but something had happened to the engines and they flew for a long period of time with just one engine, and luckily nothing bad happened to his plane.
The pathfinders, as they were called, went ahead of all the heavy bombers at night and laid flares (targets) for the bombers so they knew exactly where to drop the bombs. The usual bombs were four pounds and there were on average 14 bombs per plane. These bombs were made of pure phosphorus, and were used to set buildings, fields, etc. on fire. Used as dam busters were 24,000 pound bombs. The planes flew fairly close to the water then when they got close to the dam they would drop the bomb, and it would skip like a rock on water, then hit the dam and explode. This was something that the squadrant had practiced back at home so that they could get it perfectly when they needed it.
My Great-Grandfather and the other men stayed in billets in buildings of two stories high. The men shared the building with twenty to thirty other men, and there were about twelve other buildings on site.
Himself and his squadrant had packed all their belongings and were ready to go over to Japan to continue to fight. They were stationed in Nova Scotia, where...